Over 4,000 communication scholars from around the world gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, from 4-8 June 2026 for the 76th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA). This years theme, “Communication and Inequalities in Context,” invited researchers to examine how communication structures reflect, reproduce, and respond to social… Read more: The Methods Lab at the 76th Annual ICA Conference in Cape Town, South Africa

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new local instance of OpenQDA, now accessible at https://openqda.intern.weizenbaum-institut.de/. This instance is hosted within the Weizenbaum Institute and provides researchers with a dedicated, secure environment for qualitative data analysis. As of now, LDAP authentication is not yet implemented, so access requires… Read more: OpenQDA now locally available at WI

The crisis in academic publishing, along with its various sub-crises (the replication crisis, the procurement crisis, the AI-driven transformation of research, etc.), remains a topic of widespread debate. However, high article processing charges (APCs), oligopolistic publishing structures, and the dominance of reputation-based journals continue to shape scholarly publishing. Fortunately, there… Read more: Open Research Europe: Open-Access Publishing Platform with Open Peer Review Starting Fall 2026

You may remember last year’s Methods lab survey assessing the institute’s methodological training needs, which found that 20% of participants requested additional support in data visualization and modeling. After the success of the scientific data visualization workshop led by Dr. Ansgar Hudde in winter 2025, the Methods Lab would like… Read more: Books on Data Visualization